INTRODUCTION Sympathy is the common feeling of understanding others’ suffering, of caring about others’ trouble and grief, and of supporting others in the form of shared feelings. The origin of the word sympathy, however, is not comprised to the compassionate perception of the calamities of others. It used to convey a broader concept than the feeling of pity and sorrow for someone else’s misfortune. The Greek word sympatheia (συμπάθεια) covers the general meaning of fellow-feelings, where pathos (πάθος) refers to any kind of emotion or passion, including pleasure and pain. In harmony with the etymological origins of the word, the 18th-century Scottish philosophers, David Hume (1711 - 1776) applied the technical term sympathy in a more extended meaning than today’s common usage …show more content…
Hume discusses sympathy in detail in his Treatise of Human Nature (1739, Treatise hereafter), where he explicates that sympathy is a complex mechanism not to be confused with the feeling of compassion. Since Hume carefully avoided transgressing the is-ought gap, the nature of the entire Treatise is descriptive. Hume kept away from being normative in their writings, for which reason his works provide us with no direct advice on how to use the sympathetic principle in a conscious manner if it is possible at all. The present paper intends to find a systematic reading of Hume’s Treatise from the point of view of what the mechanism of sympathetic communication implies in terms of strengthening our action of understanding, of being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of others. Accordingly, the current study investigates to what extent the sympathetic process can actively be modified and in what manner sympathetic feelings can be generated as described in Hume’s
The position of God and misery is a quite difficult position. Hume the author of this book wanted to show that not everything has to involve a God and it is not reasonable to do so. Hume’s characters resemble points that generally describe opinions of the general population of the Earth. With this he is able to create a dialogue that all people can relate to. But his intention of this book is not to support all opinions but his own.
Mencius calls this the “heart-mind” concept. The idea of the “heart and mind” is the same as that of an auto response. Say a child is drowning in the neighbor's pool, the reaction would be to run out and save it, not for the sake of winning praise or reward, but to simply save the child’s life. This auto affective cognitive response to the child’s suffering is proof that sympathy appeals to the “heart-mind” concept. Saving a child from drowning leaves no opportunity to think about any form of consequence. Perhaps there is a large dog in the backyard of the neighbors house, or the mother of the child attacks you due to trespassing, or the guilt and sadness you could potentially feel for not being able to revive the child. There would be no time to consider oneself in this moment of panic, the good within us knows only to hurry and save the
Megan Darnley PHIL-283 May 5, 2014 Compatibilism and Hume. The choices an individual makes are often believed to be by their own doing; there is nothing forcing one action to be done in lieu of another, and the responsibility of one’s actions is on him alone. This idea of Free Will, supported by libertarians and is the belief one is entirely responsible for their own actions, is challenged by necessity, otherwise known as determinism. Those championing determinism argue every action and event is because of some prior cause.
Furthermore, Jeremy Rifkin writes “The Age of Reason is being eclipsed by the Age of Empathy,”(qtd. in Huffington 551). As the years go by, the sign of empathy within humans increase. The increase of empathy is valuable but, there is not reason behind the empathy. Rifkin makes the case that
Human beings surpass other animals in the ability to vicariously experience other beings feelings. Two overlapping and interchangeable terms have been developed to explain human’s capacity to experience others’ feelings- sympathy and empathy. Though convenient, the interchanging has created some confusion. Burton, in his support, points out people always confuse the word empathy with sympathy, compassion as well as pity, which are just but reactions to other people’s plight (1). This paper discusses the difference between empathy and sympathy and analyzes the story “Every day Use” from the sympathy and empathy perspective.
Empathy is imperative to teach kids from a young age in order to help them recognize mental states, such as thoughts and emotions, in themselves and others. Vital lessons, such as walking in another’s shoes or looking at a situation in their perspective, apprehends the significance of the feelings of another. Our point of view must continuously be altered, recognizing the emotions and background of the individual. We must not focus all of our attention on our self-interest. In the excerpt, Empathy, written by Stephen Dunn, we analyze the process of determining the sentiment of someone.
Hume’s best argument against the tacit consent theory is the one focusing on the person who took over the land of the “lawful prince” (194). The new ruler has ruled for about 10 years and has not had any outbreaks of discontent or rebellion however this is not due to a perfectly content people that he is ruling over. The people that are being ruled over by the new sovereign are inwardly opposed to the idea of how he overthrew the previous prince but they are too afraid to do anything thus expressing tacit consent. The mere fact that the people are too afraid to do anything about the new ruler or express their displeasure in any way because they are frightened of the power that he possesses and the armies that he can send does not justify how
Empathy, is a self-conscious characteristic human beings hold that allows them to understand another individual’s situation and feelings (Segal, Cimino, Gerdes &Wagaman, 2013). In regard to ho...
Empathy’s emotional nature tempts us to pass it off as a fixed concept. Just as emotions tend to elicit a consistent response, such as tears in response to sorrow, we often categorize empathy as having particular unwavering benefits and downfalls. Empathy’s benefits lie in its connective abilities, but its short duration is often its undoing. Yet the history of humanitarianism implies that empathy is not as steadfast as its stereotype. In early Western history, pain was seen as “a pathway to spiritual enlightenment,” thus inciting little empathy from its witnesses (Hutchinson). Then, upon the emergence of modern medicine, pain became an option rather than a requirement of life, and thus the culture that had once responded to pain with apathy began to show empathy (Hutchinson). Societal expectations clearly mitigate empathetic responses to some extent, which means changing these expectations could revitalize modern humanitarian efforts. Of course, the transformation that Hutchinson refers to took place over
Why is incest deplorable amongst humans, but not for dogs? What makes it acceptable for a man to kill a deer, but wrong if he kills another man? Why do these lines get drawn between humans and animals? David Hume has an answer to these questions. Though many philosophers, like Saint Augustine, argue that humans are morally different from animals because of their capability to reason, Hume states that it is passion and sentiment that determines morality. In his book, Treatise with Human Nature, Hume claims that vice and virtue stems from the pleasure or pain we, mankind, feel in response to an action not from the facts that we observe (Hume, 218). Hume uses logic to separate morality into a dichotomy of fact and value, making it clear that the only reasonable way to think of the ethics of morality is to understand that it is driven by passion, as opposed to reason (Angeles, 95). In this essay I will layout Hume's position on morality and defining ambiguous terms on the way. After Hume's argument is well established, I will then precede to illustrate why it is convincing and defend his thesis against some common objections.
“For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes” a quote by Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. This quote address the feeling of empathy yet so many of us confuse the definition of empathy with the definition of sympathy. So what is empathy?
Hume draws upon the idea of building knowledge from experiences and introduces the concept of ca...
In this paper I will defend David Hume’s Moral Sense Theory, which states that like sight and hearing, morals are a perceptive sense derived from our emotional responses. Since morals are derived from our emotional responses rather than reason, morals are not objective. Moreover, the emotional basis of morality is empirically proven in recent studies in psychology, areas in the brain associated with emotion are the most active while making a moral judgment. My argument will be in two parts, first that morals are response-dependent, meaning that while reason is still a contributing factor to our moral judgments, they are produced primarily by our emotional responses, and finally that each individual has a moral sense.
Something must be desirable on its own account, and because of its immediate accord or agreement with human sentiment and affection” (87). In conclusion, I believe that Hume thinks that reason, while not completely useless, is not the driving force of moral motivation. Reasons are a means to sentiments, which in turn are a means to morality, but without reasons there can still be sentiments. There can still be beauty. Reasons can not lie as the foundation of morality, because they can only be true or false.
In David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, he divides the virtues of human beings into two types: natural and artificial. He argues that laws are artificial and a human invention. Therefore, he makes the point that justice is an artificial virtue instead of a natural virtue. He believed that human beings are moral by nature – they were born with some sense of morality and that in order to understand our “moral conceptions,” studying human psychology is the key (Moehler). In this paper, I will argue for Hume’s distinction between the natural and artificial virtues.